NYT: Fathers Defeated, Democratic Sons Strike Back: Culver, Bayh, Carter

[DeepModem Mom]

Fathers Defeated, Democratic Sons Strike Back
By ROBIN TONER
Published: August 14, 2006


(Kenneth Dickerman for The New York Times)
Jack Carter, a candidate for U.S. Senate, spoke at a church as his father, Jimmy Carter, listened.

In the history of the Democratic Party, the election of 1980 looms large: the year the party lost the White House, the Senate, a generation of Midwestern liberals and, in some ways, its confidence that it was the natural, even inevitable, majority party....

***

Call it the return of the sons: Chet Culver, the Iowa secretary of state and the son of former Senator John C. Culver, is running for governor of Iowa. Senator Evan Bayh, son of former Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, is organizing and testing the waters for a possible presidential bid in 2008. And Jack Carter, the son of former President Jimmy Carter, has decided at the age of 59 to run an uphill race for the Senate in Nevada, his first foray into electoral politics.

All of them had their political sensibilities shaped, to some extent, by the election that defeated their fathers and began a generation of conservative dominance. The Democratic strategist William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, described it as the first of “a series of rolling shocks” for the Democratic Party that “started in 1980,” when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, “and really didn’t end until 1994.”

They say their values are the same as their fathers’, but their political approach is adapted to a different time. In one measure of the difference, the elder Mr. Bayh and Mr. Culver were invariably described as liberals; the sons, in recent interviews, avoided the term.

“I find the world just too complex to embrace a single ideological point of view,” Evan Bayh said. Moreover, he argued, conservative strategists like Karl Rove like nothing better than to push Democrats into an ideological corner....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/washington/14sons.html?ref=todayspaper

[zanne]

1. Jack Carter looks like his father 30 years ago!

When I first glanced at the picture, I thought it was an old one of Jimmy Carter. I hope his campaign is successful.